Futurama - Season 1 [1999]

The opening series (premiered in 1999) sees nerdy pizza delivery boy Fry transferred to the 31st century in a cryogenic mishap. There, he meets the beautiful, one-eyed Leela (voiced by Married with Children's Katey Sagal) and the incorrigible alcoholic robot Bender. The three of them join Fry's great (x30) nephew Professor Farmsworth and work in his intergalactic delivery service. Hyper-real yet strangely recognisable situations ensue--Fry discovers he is a billionaire thanks to 1,000 years accrued interest, Leela must fend off the attentions of Captain Kirk-like Lothario Zapp Brannigan, and Fry accidentally drinks the ruler of a strange planet of liquid beings. --David Stubbs

On the DVD: As with the earlier Fox release of The Simpsons, Season 1 this otherwise excellent three-disc set is let down by clunky menu navigation. There are way too many copyright warnings, no "Play All" facility, and you have to click back and forth to begin each new episode or find the additional features. By way of compensation, the menus look great and there's a goodly selection of extras on each disc. The entertaining commentaries are by Matt Groening and various members of his creative team, including producer David X Cohen and John DiMaggio (the voice of Bender) and Billy West (Fry). There are a handful of deleted scenes for certain episodes, plus the script and storyboard for the very first episode and an interactive stills gallery. The 4:3 picture is pin-sharp as is the Dolby 2.0Surround.--Mark Walker

Customer reviews:

Better than the simpsons!, 2008-03-06
DO not expect "the simpsons in space" with Futurama- the humour is more adult and darker, the setting is not cosy, like the simpsons' suburb. I think the feel of the show was founded in the first episode with Fry walking into a suicide booth, thinking it was a phonebox. The animation is excellent-3D is mixed with Matt Goerning's distinctive style, making the show very appealing visually (except the bits with Zoidberg in- he's intentionally disgusting).
The sci-fi references are numerous, but you don't have to be a big sci-fi fan to enjoy Futurama, in fact, you can laugh at the genre with this show. In the audio commentary (which is availible on every episode and is very good) Goerning explains that the futurama universe is a mixture of dystopian and utopian elements (both are lampooned of course), meaning that the futuristic setting is, well, alot like is is now. Although the Simpson is increasingly relying on farce and fantasy for its plot, which is unbelieveable in the setting, futurama is believeable, despite being pure fantasy.

Far better than the Simpsons, 2007-05-31
Created by the same people who made The Simpsons, Futurama never reached the same popularity as its predecessor but is in my view far superior. Fry, a good-for-nothing pizza delivery boy is accidentally put in cryogenic storage for a thousand years and wakes up in the year 3000. Throughout the season all the episodes are of high quality and all are hilariously funny. The animation is great with a mixture of 3D and 2D animation leading to it being far more visually interesting than the Simpsons. Also Futurama is aimed at a rather more mature audience than The Simpsons and many other western animations and younger viewers may be left bemused by some of the humour. Overall Futurama is probably the best animated series to come out of America in years and the show only gets better from here.